`Colored Museum` Degenerates Into A Crude And Vulgar Display

September 26, 1987|By Richard Christiansen, Entertainment editor.

Like most other satirical revues, George C. Wolfe`s ``The Colored Museum`` has ups and downs in the quality of its writing.

Both amusing and angry in its treatment of black issues, the play, for all its literary limitations, is a very prevalent commodity on the nonprofit theater circuit this season. Following its much admired version at the Public Theatre in New York and its transfer to the Royal Court Theatre in London, it has been picked up for presentation by many resident theaters across the country, all of them eager to have a work that is both topical and popular on their subscription lists.

The playwright has a fairly small number of themes to deal with in the 11 sketches that make up his show, hammering home in comedy and music the message that black people are not to be filed as stereotypes, that they should be free to revel in their rich heritage and that their power is in their fine madness and in their ``colored contradictions.``

Perhaps the most specific example of these repeated themes is

``Symbiosis,`` in which a neatly dressed Buppie (black urban professional)

tries to trash all traces of his blackness-albums by Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson Five, and autographed photos of Jomo Kenyatta and Donna Summer-much to the dismay of his ragged street brother.

Wolfe makes his points sharply in the revue`s already celebrated central spoof of ``The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,`` which skewers black cliches in the theater propogated by everyone from Lorraine Hansberry to Katherine Dunham; and he bludgeons the issue clumsily with an interminable and embarrassing solo for a female singer (Lala Lamazing Grace) who is trying vainly to disconnect herself from her her good, black roots.

In the Chicago-area premiere production of ``The Colored Museum`` at Victory Gardens Theater, however, it`s hard to distinguish the deft from the dumb, because the coarse staging and acting turn everything into a crude, vulgar display.

There`s no doubt about the power of the gleeful rage that Rita Warford puts into her grinning portrait of the jolly cook ``Aunt Ethel,`` stirring up a formula of survival and humility to produce ``a batch of Negroes.`` And there`s certain talent aflame in Terrence C. Carson`s defiant drag queen, Miss Roj, snappping her fingers at the sick fear and defeat of his world.

Similarly, while Wolfe`s writing sometimes sinks into comatose metaphysics, as in the ``Soldier with a Secret`` segement, it also can perk up for some good, low laughs in such inventive skits as ``The Hairpiece,`` a funky exchange between a black woman and two talking wigs on her dressing table.

But the writing and the acting talents of the three women and two men in this version of ``The Colored Museum`` are so grossly broadened by the direction of Andre De Shields that the scenes seem merely loud and the acting appears simply out of breath in its effort to squeeze applause from the audience. (There`s even a strange bit of male skin show that has nothing to do with anything.)

The production, which uses a balky revolving disk to get scenery on and off the thrust stage for each scene change, is ambitious, but the basic impulse of the staging is cheap.

PROGRAM NOTE: Next week`s Chicago premiere engagement of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo in the Chicago Theatre has been reduced to three performances, at 2 and 8 p.m. Wednesday and 8 p.m. Thursday. There will be no programs on Friday and Oct. 3 and 4.

`THE COLORED MUSEUM`

A play by George C. Wolfe, directed by Andre De Shields, with music by Kysia Bostic, sets and lighting by William C. Mrkvicka and costumes by Kerry Fleming. Opened Sept. 24 at Victory Gardens Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., and plays at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 6 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 1. Length of performance: 1:45. Tickets are $15 and $19. Admission to a 2 p.m. matinee Oct. 21 for students and senior citizens is $11; no performance Oct. 20. Discount parking available. Phone 871-3000.